Month: February 2013

Defense Nerds Strike BackAt Wired, there was a symposium on the Battle of Hoth (from the Empire Strikes Back, awhere contributors analyzed the battle as though it was a historical event. My favorite contribution, though was by Tim Burke, The Longue Duree of the Galactive Empire, wherein he talks about Hoth as a particularly well known, but otherwise unremarkable example of a recurring type of event in the Star Wars Universe.

”Treating the Rebellion as a privileged mode of dissent in an era when many other systems and social classes were in other ways ‘slipping through the fingers’ of the Coruscant metropole is itself granting too much credit to a ragtag band of avidly self-promoting malcontents.”

Quitters Never Win– An article on the Atlantic about the pitfalls of leaving social media. The author specifically addresses recent articles advising or giving strategies for opting out of Facebook and he is right to a point. Not being on Facebook does cut you out of opportunities for “self-expression,” and it is true that most of the security concerns about Facebook in contrast to other social outlets are overblown, that many of the strategies for hiding important information are self-defeating, and that an increasing amount of social planning (even for academic events) is going through Facebook. What he doesn’t address is the veneer of proximity that lulls people into a false sense of connectivity and intimacy, a feeling that I miss sometimes, but that also left me with a deep sense of disquiet. Then there was the amount of idle time spent on Facebook and my frustrations with some of the heavy handed changes Facebook was making.

That being said, the author tries to use the example of Facebook as to why you shouldn’t quit any social media sites, and the same concerns on those other media sites as to why you should not quit Facebook. It sounds nice and, like I said, true to a point, but it is also overly simplistic.

The Geography of Happiness– A study of vocabulary from Twitter charts happiness by state. Certainly there is more that could be done to substantiate the findings (as the article points out), but it provides food for thought.

Mali rebels torched library of ancient manuscripts– The first (confused) report out of Timbuktu after French forces recaptured the city. The mayor of Timbuktu claimed the rebels torched the library, though some reports are indicating that a large number of manuscripts were not burned or were never at that library , and also that some three hundred sufi shrines were destroyed. As terrible a loss as this is, what frightens me more is the statement by Malian officials that (partly) as a result of this action, all rebels need to be killed. First, wholesale slaughter is never the answer, but, more importantly, there are also several different rebel groups, as well as ethnic Tuaregs who have not revolted against the government, but who are lumped in with the rebels.

Unesco to rebuild wrecked Timbuktu tombs– UNESCO is taking it upon itself to rebuild the lost tombs at Timbuktu out of local mudbrick, replicating as best as possible the original structures. I understand why they are doing it and that they have little recourse, but it nonetheless feels that the tombs and sites have already lost something fundamental and to rebuild them feels as though people wish to pretend that the destruction never happened.

The Lawless Sahel Offers a Vast Santuary to Islamist Extremists– An article in Spiegel that looks at the gap between the Mahgreb in North Africa and the areas claimed and controlled by sub-Saharan countries as a region that has historically fostered insurgents, but is now providing refuge to Islamist extremists. Only the Algerian army has had success against the Islamists in the region, in large part because the Islamists tend to be better paid and equipped than the national soldiers (such is the case in Mali). Despite this, the Islamists are under a variety of leaders and are unified in purpose alone.

About

Welcome to my blog. Although the host is new, the blog is not--the first post went up in January 2008.
I write about a variety of topics here including, but hardly limited to, baking, books, movies, historical topics, and politics. This is a catchall where I write about whatever I want to write about.